Inside Health

Why Men Don't Last: Self-Destruction as a Way of Life

Published: February 17, 1999

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''We can speculate all we want, but we really don't know why men drink more than women,'' said Enoch Gordis, the head of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Nor does men's comparatively higher rate of suicide appear linked to the risk-taking profile. To the contrary, Paul Duberstein, an assistant professor of psychiatry and oncology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, has found that people who complete a suicidal act are often low in a personality trait referred to as ''openness to experience,'' tending to be rigid and inflexible in their behaviors. By comparison, those who express suicidal thoughts tend to score relatively high on the openness-to-experience scale.

Given that men commit suicide more often than women, and women talk about it more, his research suggests that, in a sense, women are the greater risk-takers and novelty seekers, while the men are likelier to feel trapped and helpless in the face of changing circumstances.

Silvia Cara Canetto, an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has extensively studied the role of gender in suicidal behaviors. Dr. Canetto has found that cultural narratives may determine why women attempt suicide more often while men kill themselves more often. She proposes that in Western countries, to talk about suicide or to survive a suicidal act is often considered ''feminine,'' hysterical, irrational and weak. To actually die by one's own hand may be viewed as ''masculine,'' decisive, strong. Even the language conveys the polarized, weak-strong imagery: a ''failed'' suicide attempt as opposed to a ''successful'' one.

''There is indirect evidence that there is negative stigma toward men who survive suicide,'' Dr. Canetto said. ''Men don't want to 'fail,' even though failing in this case means surviving.'' If the ''suicidal script'' that identifies completing the act as ''rational, courageous and masculine'' can be ''undermined and torn to pieces,'' she said, we might have a new approach to prevention.

Dr. Pollack of the Center for Men also blames many of men's self-destructive ways on the persistent image of the dispassionate, resilient, action-oriented male -- the Marlboro Man who never even gasps for breath. For all the talk of the sensitive ''new man,'' he argues, men have yet to catch up with women in expanding their range of acceptable emotions and behaviors. Men in our culture, Dr. Pollack says, are pretty much limited to a menu of three strong feelings: rage, triumph, lust. ''Anything else and you risk being seen as a sissy,'' he said.

In a number of books, most recently ''Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood,'' he proposes that boys ''lose their voice, a whole half of their emotional selves,'' beginning at age 4 or 5. ''Their vulnerable, sad feelings and sense of need are suppressed or shamed out of them,'' he said -- by their peers, parents, the great wide televised fist in their face.

HE added: ''If you keep hammering it into a kid that he has to look tough and stop being a crybaby and a mama's boy, the boy will start creating a mask of bravado.''

That boys and young men continue to feel confused over the proper harmonics of modern masculinity was revealed in a study that Dr. Pollack conducted of 200 eighth-grade boys. Through questionnaires, he determined their scores on two scales, one measuring their ''egalitarianism'' -- the degree to which they think men and women are equal, that men should change a baby's diapers, that mothers should work and the like -- and the other gauging their ''traditionalism'' as determined by their responses to conventional notions, like the premise that men must ''stand on their own two feet'' and must ''always be willing to have sex if someone asks.''

On average, the boys scored high on both scales. ''They are split on what it means to be a man,'' said Dr. Pollack.

The cult of masculinity can beckon like a siren song in baritone. Dr. Franklin L. Nelson, a clinical psychologist at the Fairbanks Community Mental Health Center in Alaska, sees many men who get into trouble by adhering to sentimental notions of manhood. ''A lot of men come up here hoping to get away from a wimpy world and live like pioneers by old-fashioned masculine principles of individualism, strength and ruggedness,'' he said. They learn that nothing is simple; even Alaska is part of a wider, interdependent world and they really do need friends, warmth and electricity.

''Right now, it's 35 degrees below zero outside,'' he said during a January interview. ''If you're not prepared, it doesn't take long at that temperature to freeze to death.''